THINK the world's best footballers are born rather than made? Matthew Syed, three-time Commonwealth table-tennis champion and author of an acclaimed book on talent, Bounce, begs to differ.
You only have to compare a Sunday league game with a Champions League tussle at the Nou Camp or Old Trafford to see the importance of natural ability in football. At the local park, you see players trying awfully hard, chasing around the pitch and even nailing the occasional long pass, but you see little of thrilling quality.
In the top European leagues – particularly among the best clubs – you see something quite different: touch, feel, finesse, vision, the ability to hit an inch-perfect pass across the field into the path of an team-mate. These are the things that elevate football, to those of us who love the sport, into something approaching an art form, like chess played at speed.
Talent is the word we use to rationalise this schism between the best and the rest: the idea that sporting stars are born with greatness encoded in their DNA. How else to explain how Lionel Messi can perform with such creativity? How else to explain the sublime consistency of Paul Scholes? How else to understand the sheer accuracy of David Beckham’s free-kicks?
It boils down to the idea that sporting excellence is reserved for a select group of individuals – winners in a genetic lottery that passed the rest of us by.
But what if this seductive idea is all wrong? What if our deepest assumptions about success in football – indeed, in life itself – are entirely misconceived? What if talent itself is not just a meaningless concept, but a corrosive one, robbing ourselves and our children of the incentive to work hard and excel?
"It is practice, not talent that is driving patterns of success and failure" I first started asking these questions when examining my own journey in table tennis. It was a journey that took me from suburban Reading to the top of the podium at three Commonwealth Championships. Like most high achievers I put it down to god-given talent; to things like speed, guile, adaptability, agility and reflexes. Sometimes I would marvel that I had these skills in such abundance that they were capable of elevating me beyond hundreds of thousands of others aspiring to that precious top spot.
But could it be that my success was not about talent at all, but simply about hard work and opportunity? Could it be that expertise in football and table tennis, or indeed anything else in life or sport, is a consequence not of innate skill but of thousands of hours of practice? Could it be that all of us have the potential to stride the path to excellence?
After all, what is talent? We all think we know it when we see it. As a coach at a leading football academy told me: “Any decent coach can spot a talented player. It is something about the way they move, the way they cushion the ball, the way they see the opportunities around them. When they have all that, you just know in your guts that they have the potential to make it to a professional level.”
But how does the coach know that this player, who looks so gifted, hasn’t had many hours of special training behind the scenes? How does he know that the initial differences in ability between this youngster and the rest will persist over years of practice? In fact, he doesn’t, as several studies have demonstrated.
A ground-breaking investigation of British musicians, for example, found that the top performers had learned no faster than those who reached lower levels of attainment: hour after hour, the various groups had improved at almost identical rates. The difference was simply that top performers had practised for more hours. Further research has shown that when top performers seem to possess an early gift for music, it is often because they have been given extra tuition at home by their parents.
Not convinced? Then consider the remarkable bias in the birth dates among top players
in various sports, something discussed by Malcolm Gladwell, the American author.
At one point in the Premier League in the 1990s, for example, there were 288 players born between September and November, but only 136 between June and August.
Why is this? If success in football is all about having the right genes, are we to infer that individuals born towards the start of the year are more talented than those born in the latter half of the calendar? Or, could this bias be caused by something quite different?
In fact, the answer is quite simple. The eligibility cut-off for youth football in England is September 1. This means that a player who turns, say, 11 on September 2 could be playing alongside a player who is almost 12 months younger. This represents a big difference in physical maturity at such a young age. Coaches respond by picking the older boy for the first team, not because he is a more skilful player, but because he is a little older.
But this means that the older boy gets access to more and better training sessions, he plays in more matches, he works with better coaches. Within a few years, a large gap in skill has opened up between the two players – not because the older boy is “more talented”, but because he has had more training because of an arbitrary cut off date for age-eligibility. To put it another way, it is practice, not talent, that is driving patterns of success and failure.
In international football, where the cut-off date used to be August 1, one recent junior world championship boasted 135 players who were born in the three months born after August 1 and just 22 born in May, June and July. Today the cut-off date for international junior soccer is January 1. In the Czech national junior football team of 2007, an astonishing 19 of the 21 players were born between January and June. None were born in the last three months of the year.
Of course, adherents to the talent myth will dismiss these statistics. They will point to child prodigies – boys and girls who reach world-class levels of performance in their teens – as proof of the importance of talent. Surely these youthful performers have been blessed with amazing skills; skills that have enabled them to take a shortcut to eminence? Or have they? A closer inspection reveals a very different story.
“Success is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and love of what you are doing”
Tiger Woods was considered a miracle golfer when he became the youngest winner of the US Masters in 1997. “The most talented player of all time,” was the assessment of one pundit. But now consider that Woods was given a golf club five days before his first birthday; that by the age of two he played his first round of golf; that by five he had accumulated more hours
of practice than most of us achieve in a lifetime. Far from being a golfer zapped with special powers that enabled him to circumvent practice, Woods is someone who embodies the rigours of practice.
Precisely the insight that applies to Messi, Beckham and all the other top footballers who seem to have got to the top in double-quick time, as a quick glance at their autobiographies demonstrate. Beckham, for example, would take a football to a park in East London as a young child and kick it from precisely the same spot for hour upon hour. “His dedication was breathtaking,” his father has said. “Sometimes it seemed that he lived on the local field.”
Beckham’s dedication has never wavered. Describing his work ethic in 1994, two years after his Manchester United debut, Sir Alex Ferguson was almost breathless in admiration: “He watches the senior players, practises all the time, his quality in the use of the ball is fabulous, and he works all the time on his technique.’ Similar eulogies have been made by team-mates at Real Madrid, AC Milan and LA Galaxy.
Take any top footballer and the same story just keeps repeating itself. Here is Messi: “With hard work, anything is possible. I can assure you that you can dream and that dream can
be achieved.” Here is Pele: “Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.”
Cristiano Ronaldo, another of the world’s top players, completes the picture. When Jose Mourinho joined Real Madrid he was astounded by the work ethic of the winger. “He has an amazing way of working,” Mourinho said. “After seeing it up close, it is impressive for a player with the status he has that no-one works harder than him. Because of the way he works, it is easy to demand from others what I want in regard to the dedication to work.” And so it goes on.
The illusion of talent arises because we only see a tiny proportion of the work that goes into the construction of virtuosity. If we were to examine the incalculable hours of practice, the many years ingraining excellence, the thousands of baby steps taken by world-class performers to get to the top, the skills would not seem quite so mystical, or so inborn.
“The idea that skill hinges on practice rather than talent makes a mockery of the way coaches think about success”
Extensive research has shown that there is not a single top performer in any complex task who has bypassed the 10 years of hard work necessary to reach the top. As Beckham put it: “My secret is practice. I’ve always believed that if you want to achieve anything special in life you have to work, work and then work some more.”
Of course, none of this is to deny that some kids start out better than others; it is merely to suggest that the starting point we all have in life is not particularly relevant. Why? Because over time, with the right kind of practice, we change so dramatically.
It’s not just the body that changes, but the anatomy of the brain. The region of the brain governing spatial navigation in taxi drivers is substantially larger than for non-taxi drivers, but it did not start out like this. Rather, it developed over time with years on the job. Similar results will doubtless be found when brain imaging tests are carried out on professional footballers.
It is not just the brute quantity of practice that matters, of course, but also the quality. A key question for coaches, then, is how to create drills that push performers beyond their existing limitations and thus unleash the forces of personal transformation. One way that has been tried and tested in football is futsal (short for ‘futebol de salao’).
Futsal is a bit like football, except it is compressed, compacted and distilled into a concentrated form. The ball is smaller and heavier, the theatre of space is shrunken relative to the wide open expanses of a conventional pitch. It is as if all the complex dynamics, competitive intensity and ferocious interaction of football have been packed into a nutshell.
What this means is that in futsal you touch the ball around six times more per minute than in normal football, and the smaller ball demands more precise handling. It rewards improvisation, creativity and technique; you can’t get out of a tight spot by just booting the ball downfield. As Dr Emilio Miranda, Professor of Soccer at the University of Sao Paolo, says: “No time plus no space equals better skills. Futsal is our national laboratory of improvisation.”
Almost all of the most revered Brazilian players were schooled in futsal. “Futsal was important in helping to develop my ball control, quick thinking and passing,” says Pele. “I played only futsal as a youngster,” says Zico, who scored 52 goals in 72 international matches for Brazil. “It’s the best start for kids.”
Ronaldo, the highest goal scorer in the history of the World Cup and one of only two men to have won FIFA World Player of the Year three times, says: “Futsal is how I really got started. This is my love, the thing that I enjoyed the most.” And Ronaldinho, one of the most creative players of his generation and twice World Player of the Year, agrees, saying: “When you come to play normal soccer, it’s easy if you’ve come from futsal.”
Of course, the idea that skill hinges on specialised practice rather than talent makes a mockery of the way most coaches think about success. The very idea that most boys can attain excellence is totally at odds with the assumption held by the establishment. It is a bit like the situation in the US where Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics, overturned conventional wisdom in baseball by shifting the scouting of players onto their stats for on-base and slugging percentage rather than the usual indicators of speed and contact.
If you are still unconvinced by the power of practice, consider again my journey in table tennis. To many enthusiasts my skills seemed nothing less than a miracle. But was it?
When I hit the top of the England rankings, most of the other top players in the nation were not merely from the same town as me, but the very same street: Silverdale Road in Reading. Had some ping-pong virus spread through the area without touching the surrounding roads and villages? Of course not: the success was about the coming together of factors of a similar kind to those that have, from time to time, elevated other tiny places into the sporting ascendancy (Spartak, an impoverished Moscow tennis club, created more top 20 women players between 2005-2007 than the whole of the US).
In particular we all had access to a top coach (who happened to be a teacher at the local primary school) and to the only 24-hour-a-day club in the county. We started out as ordinary table tennis players but through a peculiar set of circumstances we were transformed into extraordinary players. The evidence is overwhelming: excellence in sport is not explained by talent, but by hard work, will and opportunity.
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